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Grilled Sardines
Drain large sardines and cook in a chafing-dish until thoroughly heated but not fried. Pour over them while in the chafing-dish a tablespoon of lemon juice and served on finger-length pieces of toast.
A two-minute chafing-dish savoury from the era when a spirit lamp on the sideboard was standard equipment for after-theatre suppers. The whole trick is heat without frying.
- The chafing-dishThe recipe does not say which pan, but gentle direct heat in the blazer rather than the hot-water bath suits it. A small skillet over low heat does the same job; the point is gentle, even warmth rather than a searing surface.
- Do not let them fryThe hinge of the recipe. Sardines are already cooked and packed in oil; once the oil starts to shimmer and spit, the fish dries out and the flesh shreds. Warm them through in two to three minutes, turning once with a fork or thin spatula.
- "Large sardines"Modern tins labelled sardines in olive oil, four to six fish per tin, are the right thing; skinless-boneless fillets fall apart too readily.
- DrainingTip the tin against the lid and let the oil run off for a minute. Blotting the fish briefly on paper keeps the toast from going greasy underneath.
- Lemon juiceA tablespoon, poured over the fish in the dish as the recipe directs, with the flame turned right down so it perfumes rather than boils away. Fresh juice only; the bottled sort tastes flat against oily fish.
- The toast"Finger-length pieces" means fingers cut from a thin slice of white bread, toasted dry and firm so they carry the fish without collapsing. Cut them after toasting for cleaner edges.
- YieldOne tin serves two as a savoury or four as a canape course. Cayenne, black pepper or a scrap of chopped parsley are period-appropriate additions if you want them.
The chafing-dish had a genuine vogue in American households between roughly 1890 and the First World War, and cookbooks of the period gave it considerable attention. It let a hostess cook at the table without a servant, which suited late suppers, bachelor rooms and college sets, and the recipes are correspondingly built from tinned and preserved goods: lobster, oysters, cheese, dried beef and sardines. Tinned sardines were among the most reliable of these, cheap, shelf-stable and imported in quantity from Norway, Brittany and, by this date, the canneries of coastal Maine. Sardines on toast with lemon belongs to the family of small hot dishes the British called savouries, served at the end of dinner or at the end of an evening, and the version here is about as spare as the genre gets: heat, acid, toast.